SuperTux

Dec 23, 2018

SuperTux 0.6.0

The SuperTux team is excited to announce the availability of the stable release 0.6.0 after almost two years of development.

Changes:

  • Complete redesign of the icy world and forest world (Thank you, RustyBox and Serano)
  • Complete revamp of our rendering engine, the game should be much faster than it was previously
  • We now support OpenGL 3.3 Core as well as OpenGL ES 2.0, thus allowing SuperTux to be run on the Raspberry Pi, and potentially WebGL.
  • A few graphics have been updated, and effects have been added
    • The save bell was reworked (Thanks to Raghavendra “raghukamath” Kamath!)
    • Improved big Tux graphics and animations (Thanks to Alzter)
    • Various effects and shaders (Thanks to Grumbel)
  • Support for right-to-left languages through vector fonts. This will also fix a few non-ASCII characters, which often caused problems before in translations
  • A lot of other under-the-hood changes and bugfixes
  • Official Linux binaries

Note: If you’ve previously used torches in your levels and their positioning is off, please re-position them. We had to re-align their bounding boxes in order to fix bugs with their flame.

If you’d like to help with SuperTux development, you can find more resources in our wiki at https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/wiki. Please get in touch with us. The fastest way is usually IRC, but please wait if you don’t get an answer immediately. We urgently need more graphic designers and developers for future releases, help in these areas would be really appreciated.

A big thanks to all of our translators who worked very hard to translate the new strings in time.

Source tarballs and builds for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), OS X/macOS and Linux (via AppImage) are available on the Downloads page, or via GitHub.


Dec 31, 2017

2017 in Review

Hello SuperTux friends,

with 2017 coming to an end, we’d like to reflect on what’s been happening with SuperTux development in the past year and on our plans for next year.

This has been a slower-than-usual year for SuperTux with most of the changes being bugfixes. See a full list of the changes since 0.5.

Nonetheless, there are some bigger changes worth mentioning:

  • Quite a lot of work has been put into reworking levels on Forest Island (part of a larger redesign of the story, see below; many thanks to RustyBox and serano!)
  • Some new backgrounds and sprites (many thanks to BlasterMaster!)
  • Nightly builds are available now for all major platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux) (thanks to maths22 for the website and mt for implementing support for AppImages in the build system)
  • Above point also means that for the next release, Linux binaries will be available in addition to Windows and macOS binaries
  • Scripting improvements
  • Some usual fixes concerning smaller problems
  • The included PhysFS library was updated to version 3.0 (thanks to Tobbi)

These are the things we’re currently working on (with which we’ve made progress):

  • Expanding and working on the story line as dicussed in our story line meeting earlier this year.
  • Replacing our legacy scripting wrapper with Sqrat (work on this was started by christ2go and continued by Tobbi, we hope to include it into the next version)
  • Add-On manager improvements by christ2go

However, there are also some things we would like to achieve for which we need help, more or less specifically:

  • More graphics, sprites, and ideas for further game content (e.g. enemies, objects, …)
  • A change allowing proper support for non-Latin scripts, especially for RTL languages and scripts that require text shaping, is pending - however, we need support for multiple fonts or a single font that contains all the major scripts

If you haven’t noticed yet: We have released the 2016 Christmas Add-On to the public! So, go and grab it if you haven’t yet!

Furthermore, we want to invite everyone who is interested to an open discussion about plans and ideas for SuperTux during 2018. Feel free to join us next week, on January 7, 2018, either in our IRC channel #supertux on freenode, or using Riot/ Matrix in #supertux:matrix.org. You’re most likely to find some active developers around afternoon and evening in central Europe. Everyone will be welcome, we’re hoping to share our plans and ideas but also we’d like to hear more feedback from the community!

We also want to give a shoutout and big thanks to the many people who support SuperTux. This includes but is not limited to:

  • All the people who donated to the project
  • All people who designed small and large levels for SuperTux (and especially those who shared them with us)
  • All the translators, coders, graphic designers, sound designers, story writers
  • Everyone who writes bug reports and tests the game
  • People spreading the word about SuperTux on social media and other community sites

Without all of you, SuperTux wouldn’t be where it is today!

The SuperTux Team wishes everyone a happy and successful year 2018!


Feb 28, 2017

Gift Package: "Crystal Mine" by RustyBox

To show our appreciation to donors, we’ve been sending out two gift packages since last Christmas. Since we plan on making more of such gift packages in the future, we decided it was a good idea to keep everyone up-to-date about what’s in there.

However, in order to enjoy this extra content, usually provided in the form of an add-on and appropriate installation instructions for the operating systems we support, you will need to donate (via PayPal, since we can’t know your email address when you’re donating Bitcoins). Donations help us finance project-related infrastructure, paying developers or artists, and sending developers to conferences or similar. All donors get access to current, past, and future gift packages.

The current gift package contains the level “Crystal Mine” by RustyBox. It’s the first official level to use the crystal cave tiles and supposed to connect Icy Island with Forest Island in a future release of SuperTux. In addition, it features various other unique elements.

Screenshot of the "Crystal Mine" level Screenshot of the "Crystal Mine" level

Screenshots: RustyBox

If you have any questions or problems with the donation process, please send an email to team@ this domain.